My intention is to use this blog to educate people about the Catholic faith and culture, especially to promote respect for human life, especially where it is most threatened; in the beginning by abortion, in its end stages by euthanasia and by threats to our national security by terrorists. I especially hope my blog will become a resource for priests to help them with their preaching. I'll also give my own opinion on current events.

Thursday, September 07, 2006

Be Leery of the Anti-War Movement

Catholic teaching directs us to avoid war and work for peace. However, it does not require pacifism. Nations have a right to defend themselves against unjust aggressors. Also to be against war, does not require that we align ourselves with various anti-war movements, which often have other agendas.

True patriots who desire the good of their country can disagree with one another on a wide range of issues. Patriotism does not mean defending the policies of the administration in power. Nor does it require supporting war when your nation is in conflict, but it certainly excludes aiding the enemy or rooting for your country’s defeat in war, unless your nation is truly evil such as Nazi Germany or the Communist Soviet Union.

In the ancient Chinese book on military strategy called The Art of War, Sun Tzu says:

There are four matters in which concord may be lacking. When there is discord within the country the army can not be mobilized. When there is discord in the army it can not take the field. When there is lack of harmony in the field the army can not take the offensive. When there is lack of harmony in battle the army can not win a decisive victory.

America’s enemies realize that war that a big part of war is psychological They seek to win by breaking our will. Osama Bin Laden said that he was encouraged to attack America when we pulled out of Somalia. In May of 1998, ABC reporter was able to interview Osama. John Miller asked Bin Laden to describe the situation when your men took down the American forces in Somalia. Bin Laden answered:

After our victory in Afghanistan and the defeat of the oppressors who had killed millions of Muslims, the legend about the invincibility of the superpowers vanished. Our boys no longer viewed America as a superpower. So, when they left Afghanistan, they went to Somalia and prepared themselves carefully for a long war. They had thought that the Americans were like the Russians, so they trained and prepared. They were stunned when they discovered how low was the morale of the American soldier. America had entered with 30,000 soldiers in addition to thousands of soldiers from different countries in the world. ... As I said, our boys were shocked by the low morale of the American soldier and they realized that the American soldier was just a paper tiger. He was unable to endure the strikes that were dealt to his army, so he fled, and America had to stop all its bragging and all that noise it was making in the press after the Gulf War in which it destroyed the infrastructure and the milk and dairy industry that was vital for the infants and the children and the civilians and blew up dams which were necessary for the crops people grew to feed their families. Proud of this destruction, America assumed the titles of world leader and master of the new world order. After a few blows, it forgot all about those titles and rushed out of Somalia in shame and disgrace, dragging the bodies of its soldiers. America stopped calling itself world leader and master of the new world order, and its politicians realized that those titles were too big for them and that they were unworthy of them. I was in Sudan when this happened. I was very happy to learn of that great defeat that America suffered, so was every Muslim. ...

It was the bodies of American soldiers being dragged through the streets that led many Americans to want to pull troop out of Somalia that we had entered because of a humanitarian crisis. Somalia is now a failed, stateless country and a breeding ground for terrorism.

The enemy was also able to effectively use the anti-war movement to defeat the United States in Vietnam. Colonel Bui Tin fought against Americans for the People’s Army of Vietnam (North Vietnam). In an interview about the war in the Thursday August 3, 1995 edition of the Wall Street Journal he spoke about how important the anti-war movement was in helping them to defeat the United States in the Vietnam War. He said:

Every day our leadership would listen to world news over the radio at 9:00 a.m. to follow the growth of the American antiwar movement. Visits to Hanoi by people like Jane Fonda and former Attorney General Ramsey Clark and ministers gave us confidence that we should hold on in the face of battlefield reverses. We were elated when Jane Fonda, wearing a red Vietnamese dress, said at a press conference that she was ashamed of American actions in the war, and that she would struggle along with us.

Colonel Tin realized, as did George Washington, that military victories were not as important as breaking the will of the enemy:

Our losses were staggering and a complete surprise. Giap later told me that Tet had been a military defeat, though we had gained the planned political advantages when Johnson agreed to negotiate and did not run for reelection.

General Võ Nguyên Giáp was a North Vietnamese four star general and leader of a guerilla group under Hồ Chí Minh.

Ion Mihai Pacepa was acting chief of Romania's espionage service. He is the highest-ranking intelligence officer ever to have defected from the former Soviet bloc. According to Pacepa, the KGB helped to organize a conference in Stockholm to condemn America's aggression, on March 8, 1965, as the first American troops arrived in South Vietnam.

The KGB financed the World Peace Council. Yuri Andropov ordered Romesh Chondra, the Chairman of the World Peace Council, to create the Stockholm Conference on Vietnam as a permanent international organization to aid or to conduct operations to help Americans dodge the draft or defect, to demoralize its army with anti-American propaganda, to conduct protests, demonstrations, and boycotts, and to sanction anyone connected with the war. The Stockholm Conference was staffed by Soviet-bloc undercover intelligence officers and received $15 million annually from the Communist Party. This was in addition to the $50 million a year they received from the Soviet Union.

The Romanian DIE (Ceausescu's secret police) helped the The World Peace Council to distribute propaganda throughout Western Europe which helped to contribute to the virulent anti-American sentiment there today.

In speaking of Senator John Kerry's role in the anti-war movement, Pacepa said:

As a spy chief and a general in the former Soviet satellite of Romania, I produced the very same vitriol Kerry repeated to the U.S. Congress almost word for word and planted it in leftist movements throughout Europe. KGB chairman Yuri Andropov managed our anti-Vietnam War operation. He often bragged about having damaged the U.S. foreign-policy consensus, poisoned domestic debate in the U.S., and built a credibility gap between America and European public opinion through our disinformation operations. Vietnam was, he once told me, 'our most significant success'.

Pacepa says

“I can no longer look at a petition for world peace or other supposedly noble cause, particularly of the anti-American variety, without thinking to myself, "KGB….. As far as I'm concerned, the KGB gave birth to the antiwar movement in America. In 1976, Andropov gave my own Romanian DIE credit for helping his KGB do so.”

Another Soviet defector, Stanislov Lunev, tells the same story in the book 'Through the Eyes of the Enemy':

The GRU and KGB helped fund just about every antiwar movement and organization in America and abroad... What will be a great surprise to the American people is that GRU and KGB had a larger budget for antiwar propaganda in the United States than it did for economic and military support to the Vietnamese.

Today anti-war critics exaggerate U.S. war crimes and prisoner abuse at Guantanomo Bay , charge abuses of the Patriot Act, claim that Bush lied about weapons of mass destruction (WMDs), despite the fact that the Clinton Administration and many other foreign intelligence services thought that Sadddam Hussein had WMDs.

Does this mean that every person who opposes the war in Iraq is an unpatriotic Communist? Obviously not, but it should make us skeptical of the leftist propaganda that is transmitted by a press corps who despises President Bush.

It is not patriotic to jump to conclusions and believe the worst about your country on the basis of news reports by biased propagandists in the media who are too willing to let themselves be used. An example of this recently were a series of doctored pictures out of Lebanon that were used by the Reuters news service. It took bloggers to discover that the photos had been altered and Reuters was forced to pull them.

It should also give us pause about with whom we align ourselves, even in supporting good and noble causes. There are unintended consequences to war. There are also unintended consequences to supporting the anti-war movement. The America pullout of Vietnam led to religious persecution, the killing of many innocent people and a refugee problem of enormous proportions. It also caused destabilization in the region that led to the “Killing Fields” in Cambodia. It is estimated that Pol Pot and his Khmer Rouge killed between1.2 or 3 million people in Cambodia. This is one reason why the Vatican, which was opposed to the original invasion of Iraq, has now called for more nations to send troops there.

Some people oppose the war in good conscience, but others, including many leftists in America and Europe, hate America and want to see her defeated.